


The Once and Future Slytherins

by Milady1218



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Harry Potter Next Generation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 05:51:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4776026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milady1218/pseuds/Milady1218
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annalise finds her way into the Slytherin common room. Steven finds that getting her to leave is much easier said than done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Once and Future Slytherins

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Impossible History of Annalise Doyle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1476787) by [Milady1218](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milady1218/pseuds/Milady1218). 



> This story takes place about a month after the events of "The Impossible History." If you don't care to read that one, I did quite a lot of recapping, so you can probably still follow this one. But if you want to see just where Scorpius fits into the mix or what exactly went down while they were kidnapped or who in the heck Charlie is, that's all in the other story. 
> 
> IMPORTANT: neither Anna nor Steven is or ever will be romantically interested in the other. They are, for all intents and purposes, siblings.

Steven almost didn't notice Annalise in the common room when he came in after Quidditch practice. She was in plain sight, sprawled out on a couch in front of the fire with her long black curls spilling over the side, nearly grazing the floor, and he was looking in her general direction, but he was too preoccupied to consciously register that fact. All of his thoughts were on the rivalry match against Gryffindor happening in four days’ time.  At the moment, Gryffindor was in the lead for the inter-House championship, but Slytherin was only thirty points behind them. And since it was the last match of the school year, whoever won the game would win the championship. The team captain, Callum Ellery-Vance, had been pushing everyone extra-hard in preparation. Quidditch was the only thing the guys on the team had had time to do or talk about for the past week and a half.

It wasn’t until Scorpius, following right behind Stevens as usual, asked, “Um…Anna? What are you doing here?” that Steven became aware of her presence in the room and the reason that it was problematic: technically, Annalise Doyle was a Ravenclaw.

She could easily have been sorted into Slytherin. In fact, by all accounts she should have been. Though clever and talented, she was not a chaser of knowledge for its own sake; she was, however, interested in what she could do with her talents and what they in turn could do for her. As a first year, the Slytherins would have welcomed her with open arms. But in a moment of panic over what her extremely Hufflepuff parents might think of having a Slytherin for a daughter, she had chosen to talk the Sorting Hat out of putting her where it thought she belonged. Long story made short, she never managed to fit in with the other Ravenclaws and now, four years later, hardly anybody from any House – aside from her steadfast pink-haired half-blood Gryffindor best friend Charlie – wanted much of anything to do with her.

Steven was no exception. He had a reputation to maintain, but more importantly a past and secrets to keep from his housemates. Until a month ago, the only things he didn’t want anyone to know was that he and Anna had grown up next door to each other in the same small town and that his mum and hers were good friends, brought together by the mutual rarity that was raising an adopted child in the wizarding world. Now the stakes were a bit higher because it had turned out their connection was considerably deeper and weirder than just that of former playmates.

The truth was this: fifteen years ago, someone (nobody knew exactly who) had stolen an experimental potion (nobody knew exactly how) and used it to turn Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange back into children (nobody knew exactly why). Steven and Annalise were those children. This meant that they were, in addition to being childhood frenemies, also former partners in crime, in-laws, and third cousins. They had found this out only a month ago, when Scorpius’ grandmother had kidnapped them (and Scorpius also, for good measure) over the Easter holidays. Using old family photos to illustrate her point, she had explained to Steven and then to Anna why she believed that it was no coincidence that they had both been found abandoned as babies on the steps of St. Mungo’s on the same day that her husband and psychotic sister had both disappeared without a trace fifteen years ago.

They’d laughed at first. Until Anna started having bizarrely detailed dreams about events that had occurred before her birth and a wineglass spiked with veritaserum confirmed that Steven was definitely not Draco’s son. Then the idea of having been Death Eaters in a past life stopped being laughable and started being terrifyingly plausible. The coup de grâce came when an Auror (in fact, Charlie’s mother) arrived to investigate the kidnapping and Anna overheard her telling Draco that his mother’s wacky theory was indeed correct. Her words sent both teens into an existential tailspin which neither of them had a clue how to deal with, so they each chose not to. Upon returning to school, they found that the best way not to confront their shared past was to avoid each other. But then, after a month, Steven found Anna in the Slytherin common room and for a half-second that didn’t strike him as odd because once upon a time it hadn’t been.

At first, Anna pretended not to hear Scorpius and continued acting as if she spent every Tuesday evening on that couch in front of that fire. As if she thought that maybe if she did well enough pretending to belong, then people would start letting her. Oddly enough, it seemed to be working. None of the handful of students in the room, all authentic and accepted members of Slytherin House, seemed to be taking any notice of her. Steven guessed it must be because they were all first- and second-years who didn’t know many upperclassmen and would be apt to assume that any older student in the room had a right to be there, and Anna wasn’t wearing her Ravenclaw tie or any other articles of clothing which would easily mark her as an impostor.

“Anna, Scorpius asked you a question. What are you doing here?” he pressed.

Finally Annalise looked up at the boys. Noticing Steven’s unamused expression, she gave a long, overdramatic sigh. “What does it look like? I’m doing my homework,” she said, gesturing with an impatient swipe of her hand to a textbook and some papers haphazardly thrown on the table before her.

Steven highly doubted that homework was the only thing Annalise was doing there. As for what she was actually up to, he’d get to that as soon as he got the answer to the question that was really baffling him: “How did you even get in?”

Anna rolled her eyes. “You are positively _full_ of stupid questions tonight, Stevie. You know as well as I do there’s only one way in here. You speak the right password and the door opens. The question you should have asked but didn’t is how I got the password. But you didn’t ask that, so I don’t have to tell you,” she said in a singsong voice.

“You do if you don’t want to get thrown out of here,” Steven said. The self-satisfied look disappeared at once from Anna’s face. “One of my best friends is a prefect, you know. Aiden Hathaway. I could go find him right now and tell him that you snuck in, and then we’ll all find out how much trouble you’ll be in. Sound like fun? I didn’t think so. So then, here’s how this is going to work: you tell me how you got the password and then I’ll decide whether or not to tell on you. Deal?” He put out his hand to seal the agreement with a handshake.

Annalise grimaced and clapped her hand onto his. “Fine. Deal.”

“Excellent. So you got the password from…” Steven prompted, taking a seat opposite her.

“I got it from your girlfriend. I saw her heading out as I was coming up on the door and I decided to try telling her I’d forgotten the password so if she could pretty please tell me that’d be great, and you know what, Stevie? She bought it!” Anna snickered. “Not too bright, that one, but at least she’s nice looking. That’s all you ever go for in ladies, isn’t it? The looks. Cute little blondes in designer heels. Her name’s Claire, right? Claire Candler?” Steven nodded, not really liking the direction in which Annalise seemed to be steering the conversation. “So I’m curious, are you dating this Claire because you like her as a person, or simply because she looks a bit like…well, I don’t think I even need to say, do I?” she asked.

She most certainly did not, for which Steven was very glad. It was uncomfortable enough that Annalise was implying that his main reason for having Claire as a girlfriend was because she reminded him of Narcissa, the love of his former life, without having that implication be clear to Scorpius or anyone else. On some level he knew that he wasn’t going to be able to keep Scorpius in the dark forever about how they were really related to each other. Still, he would prefer if it wasn’t Annalise’s accusations about Claire which necessitated telling him. Plus it was nice to see Anna making an effort to show a little discretion once in a while. 

 “That is not why I asked her out. It isn’t. And she really don’t look that much like…” he let the end of his sentence trail off when he saw Claire and her friends come into the common room from the girls’ dorm. “…oh my god.” Annalise was right. Though far from identical, there could be no denying that Claire looked rather like Narcissa had when she was young: blonde, blue-eyed, and slender. Claire was shorter, and frankly less pretty, but the resemblance was still remarkable.

Anna smirked at him as he took it all in. “Freaky, right?”

“I hate you _so_ much right now,” he muttered.

“I…um, I’m going to go start on my Potions essay,” said Scorpius, starting off in the direction of the boys’ dorm. From the sideways look he gave Claire, it was clear that he was only a little keener on his so-called brother’s girlfriend than Anna was.

 “Hi Steven!” Claire chirped as she passed by. “How was practice?”Neither she nor her friends seemed to notice Anna’s presence in the room. Steven was blocking the line of sight between them and the couch where she was sitting, and they had been too busy chatting amongst themselves to hear him telling Anna that he hated her.

“Practice was good,” Steven said. Now that Anna had pointed it out, her resemblance to Narcissa was so distracting that he could hardly string together a coherent sentence. “The team’s in great shape.”

Claire didn’t seem to notice at all that her normally articulate boyfriend was at a loss for words to discuss something he was known for almost never shutting up about. “That’s great! I can’t wait to see you win next Saturday! Tina and I have the after-party all planned out and everything – we just need to order the cake! Do you prefer chocolate or vanilla? Personally I’m leaning towards chocolate, but Tina said I should ask you and the rest of the team because technically it’s your guys’ party, and…” Before she could launch into an hours’ worth of excruciating party planning detail, her friend Melisandre grabbed her wrist and began pulling her away. “Well, I’ve got to go! See you later, Steven!”

He waved as Mel dragged Claire out the door, but couldn’t manage to say anything more than “Okay.” Had she always been that dull, he wondered, or did he just think that now because Anna had planted the idea in his head that Claire was nothing more than a pretty face?

“That girl is _sickeningly_ perky.” commented Anna the instant Claire was out of earshot. “I can’t stand it. You’ve been dating her for what, three and a half weeks now? Four? Which means you got together with her pretty much right after we got back from our little stay-over at the Malfoys, yes?”

“Two days after,” Steven said, unable to help wincing a bit at the admission. It figured that in his efforts to stabilise his life after finding out that he was technically his best friend’s grandfather, one of the first things he’d do was get a girlfriend who looked way too much like his once-upon-a-time wife. He supposed it wasn’t the worst thing he could have done.

“Well. That explains everything, now doesn’t it? Poor Stevie, you thought you had your life all sorted and normal…” Anna snickered. As if she weren’t the poster girl for peculiarity.

“Are you going to tell me why you’re _really_ here, or what?” he snapped, changing the subject away from the idiosyncrasies of his social life to something he actually wanted to discuss with Annalise. “And _don’t_ say homework again. We both know that’s a lie. You wouldn’t have come all the way here just to sit around writing a Transfiguration essay.” He demanded, staring her down interrogation-style. Or at least the best he could do considering that she insisted on looking at the fireplace instead of his face.

Still looking at the fire, Anna said, “All of the tables in the library were taken and I can’t figure out the bloody riddle to get into the Ravenclaw common room.” She shrugged. “Plus, being here just feels right somehow. Is that weird?”

Steven wanted to say yes, but found himself hesitating. He knew all too well the feeling that Anna was referring to. He had felt the same way the first time he’d gone home with Scorpius, the previous Christmas. Despite the fact that Astoria hated him because she thought he must be her husband’s illegitimate child and Draco resented him for making Astoria think he’d cheated on her and Narcissa was emotionally unstable due to having been allegedly widowed fifteen years before under circumstances she and nobody else thought were suspicious, Steven felt a deep and inexplicable sense of rightness the instant he stepped into their front hall. He knew then as surely as he had ever known anything that he was meant to be there. That he was home. Enough of his past life was still somewhat present in his mind, though of course he didn’t know it at the time, to keep him convinced in the face of his not-so-warm welcome that he was a Malfoy.

It only made sense, then, that the same would hold true for Annalise somewhere that held a strong connection to her past – in this case, the Slytherin common room. Despite the fact that nobody in Slytherin was likely to so much as give her the time of day, her subconscious still insisted that she belonged with them.

For a moment, Steven considered taking pity on her, but he caught himself just in time. Though lonely, adrift, and scorned by people who could have been her friends had she played her cards right a couple of years ago, Annalise was hardly pitiable. On the contrary, she was all the more dangerous for having so few allegiances. If he was soft on her, she’d only give him more trouble later on, so he had to shoo her away. “As nice as it is to know that you like it so much, you still don’t actually have any right to be here,” he told her firmly.

“Technically, I was sorted into Slytherin,” Anna said with a wry smile. “A very long time ago, but still. It happened.”

“Yes, well, unfortunately for you, you aren’t _currently_ in Slytherin, therefore you are not _currently_ allowed to be in this room.” Steven said as he stood up, gathered up all of the papers she’d strewn across the table, and shoved them at her. “Here. Good luck figuring out that riddle.”

Anna didn’t take the papers. “You’re really…you’re kicking me out?” she asked, looking up at him with an ultra-contrived expression of injured surprise, very wide-eyed with her mouth hanging ever-so-slightly open. When Steven nodded, her features rearranged into a scowl. “Well, fine. I didn’t really want to put up with your stupid face all evening anyway.” She snatched the papers out of his hand and crammed them into her shoulder bag. In her haste, she accidentally let one slip out of the pile and flutter to the floor.

When she didn’t notice for a few seconds, Steven went ahead and picked the parchment up for her, glancing at it to see what class it was for (Charms). When he did, he couldn’t help but notice that she had made a rather curious mistake on it. “Um, Anna…”

“What?” she snapped.“Am I not leaving fast enough for you?”

“No, it’s not that – look at this.” He held the page out so she could look at it and jabbed a finger at the top right corner. Anna’s face went bright pink the instant she looked down and found the spot where she had written her name out as “Bellatrix Black” and also put down a date in 1968. She swore under her breath as she whipped out a pen and furiously corrected her slip-up. “When did you do this?” Steven asked.

With a shrug, Anna said, “An hour ago? Two? I don’t know – how long have I been here?”

“Less than two, since you showed up while I was at Quidditch,” Steven said. After a moment he added, “So I suppose this means that spending your time here brings out your inner pureblood psychopath. Fascinating.”

Annalise shook her head. “You’d like if that was what was going on, wouldn’t you, Stevie? Easy to explain, with the added benefit of possibly making me frightened enough of losing my sanity to ever try sneaking in here again.” She folded the paper into neat quarters before tucking it into the front pocket of her bag. “Too bad it isn’t that simple.”

“So something like this has happened to you before somewhere else, then?” Steven asked.

“This is the first time I know of that I’ve done it so overtly, but yes. Tonight wasn’t the first time I’ve, um...forgotten myself like that,” she said. “It’s happened a couple times in the dorm, late at night. That’s why Jess Jacobs started putting a silence charm on me at bedtime ever since right after we got back from our little adventure at the Malfoys’. She said I woke her up at three in the morning and threatened to kill her. I really don’t blame myself, honestly – earlier that evening, the lying little mudblood told everyone that I probably faked the kidnapping just to get attention, can you believe it? And then, last week, she claimed I stole her toothbrush! As if I’d ever even want to touch anything of hers, let alone something that had been in her mouth! But everyone still believed her, of course, because god forbid they side with the psycho freak who tried to stab her housemate with a nail file.”

At this admission, Steven took a step back as if he were afraid that Annalise’s craziness was a contagious disease. “You stabbed Jess with a nail file?” It was also at this point in the conversation that the other students in the room started leaving.

“No. I _almost_ stabbed _Waverly_ with a nail file,” she corrected him, then waited for some indication from Steven that he’d be interested to know more details of her attempted attack on her housemate two weeks ago. It was, she believed, quite an amusing story. She’d wanted to give a full dramatized account of the incident to somebody, but Charlie was far too moral to appreciate it, so she was thrilled to realize that Steven had provided a dead perfect lead-in.

To Anna’s dismay, Steven responded not with “Oh, wow, how did that happen?” but with a face-palm. “And yet you wonder why nobody likes you,” he said. And immediately regretted it.

In an instant, Anna was back to seething about the impossibility of her getting along with the other Ravenclaws. “I _tried_ , you know!” she snapped. “I tried to be nice and make friends, just like Mum and Dad and Charlie kept telling me. I wanted to fit in. At least, I did at first. Now, of course, I don’t give a damn about any of them, but as a twelve year old I honestly did want them to like me. But they didn’t.”

“Maybe because you are, have always been, and will always continue to be a terrible person?” Steven suggested.

At this, Annalise gave a snort of derision. “Stevie, you’re a compulsive liar who regularly misappropriates hundreds of galleons of money from your own parents so you can buy _hair gel_. You offer to pair with weaker students at duelling club just so you can humiliate them. And you have single-handedly rigged the outcome of at least six Quidditch games in the past two years. Who are you to judge me?”

“Someone who knows exactly what his talents are and how to use them to accomplish things, instead of an out-of-control nutcase who assaults people with random items pulled out of a makeup case and then has the nerve to turn around and complain about how unfair it is that she doesn’t have any friends!” Steven shouted. Thrusting his index finger at the door, he said, “Get out of my common room. _Now_.”

“ _Your_ common room? What, did you write your name on it or something?” Anna scoffed. Noticing that Steven’s eyes darted for a moment towards a large wall hanging in the shape of the Slytherin crest, she snickered. “You _did_ , didn’t you? You wrote your name behind that banner there!”

“If you _must_ know, it’s a century-old tradition for members of the Slytherin Quidditch team to sign that wall,” Steven said stiffly as Anna ran over to the banner and lifted it up to peek underneath it.

It took only a few seconds for her to find the spot where the name _Steven Edwards_ had been penned in the exact same hand as another name, fifty years’ worth of Quidditch players above it. It was the second name that her focus lingered on, along with the names surrounding it. The faces of the boys belonging to the names came to her in a flood of memory, followed in short order by a wave of nausea which had her leaning on the wall for support until it passed.

More than the Quidditch players themselves (most of them had been quite dull people) she remembered fragments of who she had been when they were students. People had admired her, respected her – and yes, feared her. She had made sure of that last item chiefly by threatening the life and reputation of any boy who dared make an unsolicited pass at her or her two sisters. If anybody expressed any sort of doubt that she was clever enough or ruthless enough for the threats to mean anything, they were guaranteed to learn the hard way that they were very, very wrong.

Back then, there was no question that she’d had a place in the world. Now she was no one. A nothing. Little more than an assemblage of rough-edged potential, wasting away as a girl who didn’t know who or what she was until it was too late. She could barely stand it, knowing all that life used to be and what it might have been and yet having such a pathetic existence as to be accused of stealing toothbrushes, of all things. The indignity of it all was almost physically painful. The worst part was the paradox of being struck by the insignificance of her current existence in a place where her significance had once been obvious. She put all of her energy into staying perfectly still for fear that if she didn’t she might start crying, which could only make things worse.

“Are you all right, Anna?” Steven asked. For a brief moment he considered whether it might be necessary to try to comfort her with a hand on her shoulder or something along that line, but ultimately decided against it. There was too great a chance she might react violently. He didn’t want to risk a broken arm right before the big game.

For a solid minute, Annalise remained with her head against the wall. Then, very abruptly, she straightened and turned around so that she was facing Steven. “I need to leave,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face and smoothing her uniform skirt.

“That may be the first actually sensible thing you’ve said this evening,” he said as Anna retrieved her bag from the couch where she had been sitting and started for the door without so much as attempting a cheeky comeback. Steven was so taken aback by her lack of sass that he couldn’t bring himself to give his intended parting words to her of “good riddance.” Instead, he surprised himself by responding with concern. “You almost had another episode, didn’t you?”

Annalise didn’t answer. She didn’t speak a word or look at anything but the floor until she was in front of the nearest exit. There she stopped, with her hand on the doorknob, to glance back at Steven. “See you around, pretty-boy,” she said, with a crooked grin which was half-genuine at best, then began turning the knob.

“Um, Anna? That door goes to the girls’ dorms,” Steven said.

“So it is,” said Anna. “And it’s even labelled. How nice.” She slowly took her hand off of the knob and turned around again in order to locate the door which led to the stairs up to the rest of the castle, which happened to be on the opposite side of the room. Again, she was silent as she walked to the door, but paused before opening it to speak to Steven. “Just so we’re clear, Stevie, absolutely nothing I said to you tonight, especially within the last ten minutes, is ever to be repeated to anyone, or else.”

He nodded. “Understood.” Doing that would require explaining why she had said those things to him in the first place, which he had no intention of doing if he could help it. The less his friends knew about his connection to Anna, the better. Of course, he could always tell someone who already knew, but the only person who’d care would be Scorpius’ grandmother, and informing her that Anna had almost had a mental breakdown in the Slytherin common room twice in the same evening would do nothing but cause her unnecessary worry.

“Excellent,” Anna said, then slipped out. Within five seconds, however, she stuck her head back in. “And when I say ‘don’t ever say anything to anyone,’ that means you tell no one _, ever_. Not even Scorpius, not even when you’re, like, forty and drunk at a dinner party. I _will_ find out, and I _will_ remove one of your limbs. Oh, and before I forget, just a warning, the next time I see you making out with that cheap little girlfriend of yours, I just may have to…”

Steven shoved the door closed, forcing her out. “Goodbye, Anna.”


End file.
